One pound of inference, no more, no less. No humbug, no cant, but only inference. This task done, and he would go free.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Don't you know who I am?!

There is a very high likelihood that if you ever have cause to ask 'Don't you know who I am?', you are, in fact, nobody.

In this case, you're an accused rapist. Beyond that, you're some French socialist, and the guy that runs the IMF in part because of an absurd arrangement that an American gets to run the World Bank and a European gets to run the IMF.

Don't believe me?

Quick, who's the head of the World Bank?

Yeah, I'd forgotten too. It's Robert Zoellick

But this gives us a useful proxy for roughly how important Dominique Strauss-Kahn was before he allegedly raped a maid.

Google reports about 72 million hits for 'IMF'. By comparison, it reports about 65.7 million hits for 'World Bank'. Separating out the effect of the two leaders "IMF -Dominique -Strauss-Kahn " returns 58.7 million hits, and ""World Bank" -Robert -Zoellick" returns 64.6 million. So they run roughly equally important organisations.

So how about the relative newsworthiness of the two heads of the organisations?

"Dominique Strauss-Kahn" records 18.9 million results.

'Robert Zoellick' records 1.55 million results.

Let's make the somewhat heroic assumption that Robert Zoellick and Dominique Strauss-Kahn were equally important people before this latest scandal broke.

In other words, according to Google hits, allegedly molesting a maid was around 11 times more important than everything Dominique Strauss-Kahn had done up to that point.

The irony, of course, is that at the time Dominique Strauss-Kahn was asking the question 'Don't you know who I am?', he was about to become vastly more important, but not in the way he'd like. He's certainly put the IMF on the map to a lot of rubbernecks who hadn't heard of it before!

By contrast, 'Justin Bieber' has 296 million hits. He also probably doesn't have to ask people whether they know who he is.

That's depressing in its own way, but at least should serve as a useful antidote to pompous clowns like Strauss-Kahn.